On the Nature of Syntactic Atoms: A View from Lithuanian Nominalizations

One of the most important questions in linguistics is whether languages share a universal set of features (Cinque 1999) and, if so, how these features are represented in the grammar. In the past few decades, numerous studies have explored the architecture of functional projections showing that whether features are represented by separate projections or unified into one is a matter of parametric variation. For example, famously, some languages exhibit Voice-splitting, where VoiceP and vP are two separate projections, whereas other languages exhibit Voice-bundling, where the functions of VoiceP and vP are unified under one projection (Kratzer 1997, Pylkkänen 2008, Harley 2014, Legate 2014).

In this talk, I explore the nature of syntactic atoms, namely features, as well as the (non)universality of the clausal spine, through the lens of complex event nominalizations (CENs) in Lithuanian, an understudied Baltic language. I provide a comprehensive account of how the Voice-bundling/splitting parameter works in CENs, which has never been articulated before. A common view is that CENs across languages (i) are defective, with a passive-like VoiceP, and (ii) involve splitting, with VoiceP separate from nP (Alexiadou 2017). I argue that these are not universal linguistic components of CENs. I show that Lithuanian CENs exhibit a remarkable instance of Voice-bundling:  the features of an active Voice and a nominalizer n are bundled and occur on a single syntactic head. This bundling is part of the presyntactic lexicon. I further develop a voice typology for CENs across languages and show that both voice-splitting and voice-bundling are attested in CENs, just like in verbal clauses.